From NYU Abu Dhabi, a Look at Economic Development and Technology in Africa

The Center for Technology and Economic Development (CTED), a DRI and Africa House partner organization based at NYU Abu Dhabi, will hold its annual conference, “Enhancing Economic Development through Technology”, on February 12th and 13th.

The agenda reflects CTED’s goal of combining economic principles, technological advances, and human-centric designs to address problems in developing regions, as well as DRI’s interest in exploring the role of technology in enabling bottom-up development through non-state actors. One joint DRI-CTED project, for example, evaluates whether providing Ghanaian farmers with market information via text message leads to fundamental changes in the bargaining process between farmers and traders.

At the February conference, Former Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings, now the African Union envoy to Somalia, and UAE Foreign Trade Minister Lubna Al Qasimi will give keynote speeches. Panels led by an international group of scholars and practitioners—including Mwangi Kimenyi, Director of the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings, Ethiopia Commodities Exchange Founder and CEO Eleni Gabre-Madhin, and DRI Co-Director Yaw Nyarko—will discuss mobile money, food security, education, energy, and technologies for healthcare.

We’ll be covering some of these speakers and topics here on the DRI website in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.